


Sorry for the Mess

by lonestarbabe (neverfeltlesscool), Pigeonsplotinsecrecy



Category: 9-1-1: Lone Star (TV 2020)
Genre: Blood, Depressing, Gen, Not A Happy Ending, Sad, Suicidal Thoughts, Suicide Attempt, TK is just in a bad place, a little graphic at moments, and Getting Better, can I head canon my own story??, guess that’s making it canon via the tags, i head-canon him feeling differently on better days, i will shut up now, please be careful with this one, pretty dark, substance abuse referances
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-29
Updated: 2020-03-24
Packaged: 2021-02-28 00:27:27
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,575
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22960930
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/neverfeltlesscool/pseuds/lonestarbabe, https://archiveofourown.org/users/Pigeonsplotinsecrecy/pseuds/Pigeonsplotinsecrecy
Summary: T.K. can’t help but think that everyone would be better if he was gone. He thinks maybe he should finally do something about it.
Comments: 20
Kudos: 110





	1. T.K.

**Author's Note:**

> Please be careful. This one might be hard to read. Please look to the tag for potential triggers and proceed with caution. Stay safe 💖

T.K. didn’t intend on trying to kill himself again. Well, he did, but he didn’t start his day out knowing it would be the day he’d try to die. The morning had started out easily. Routine carried him through his day, but as the day turned to evening, a little ball of anxiety began to vibrate in his stomach, growing bigger the more he tried to shake it away.

Nothing major happened to make T.K. think it was a good idea to die.No one died. No one was even hurt. Yet, T.K. Still couldn’t handle being in his skin, which felt rubbery and two sizes too small. His bones and muscles felt constricted, and his breaths became shallow. Everything was fine except the little scratches on the glassy surface that drove you crazy if there were enough of them.

So, T.K. decided it would be better to stop existing. Everyone would be better for it, really, the more he thought about it, the more convinced he was that it was true.

Maybe they’d be sad at first. Humans were sentimental creatures, after all, but logically, he knew their lives would be easier without him. It would save a lot of trouble for everyone, even if they didn’t have the perspective to see it. T.K. wasn’t being selfish. He merely wanted to make things right because everything felt so wrong. Maybe things were only shifted only two centimeters from the norm, but like threading a needle, two inches could be hopelessly far off.

He didn’t take pills this time because he didn’t want to be the kind of fuck up who broke his sobriety just before dying, but slicing himself open probably wasn’t a better choice, especially when his hands were too shaky to go deep enough to do much more than put himself in a lot of pain. He figured he might die if he waited long enough, just letting the blood make a mess on the glossy bathroom tile. He leaned against the tub, closing his eyes and letting his head grow dizzy with the hope that he may never open them again. Sometimes, eyes lashes could feel so heavy, but he could endure them now that there was a chance he could stop having to carry them and every other ounce that made life feel so impossible.

He was bleeding a lot, and he obviously knew there would be blood. Logically, he knew how much, but it was different when it was oozing from his own body.It seemed like an awful, selfish, pain in the ass thing to do, bleeding out on the floor with no regard for the stains he’d leave behind.

T.K. dreaded that people always left stains. He wished he could erase himself form existence. Then, no one would miss him when he was gone. His father wouldn’t cry over him. He wouldn’t have a funeral or a tombstone or even a past. It’d be nice to leave the world without a name. Tyler Kennedy could be melted down into T.K., so maybe T.K. could be melted into a distant memory of two letters once personified.

Seeing the horrific redness of the floor, T.K. knew he should’ve done it in the tub or somewhere that don’t have tiny tiles where blood could get lodged in grout. That would be hell to clean, but even so, for whatever reason, dying in the tub just hadn’t felt right, so he stayed on the bathroom floor not knowing what to do as blood gushed out of his arm. 

His eyes glazed over and he felt a little woozy. Maybe this was death, but he didn’t move. If you waited, he figured, death could always find you.

He heard his name being called, and he didn’t answer because he wasn’t sure who it was that was calling him. The sound of his name intensified but it was distant and echoey like T.K.’s head was under water.

As it got closer, he jolted into a moment of alertness when he realized it was his dad, the last person he wanted to be here right now and the person who would hate this situation the most. He didn’t respond. His mouth was dry and coppery. What could he say that wouldn’t give away that he was bleeding out on the floor, staining the whiteness of the apartment in shades of scarlet? He couldn’t just die here while his dad was in another room, but he didn’t ant his dad to try to stop him either.

The door creaked open and T.K. heard muffled panic. He felt his dad loom over him and a warm hand pull at his arm.

T.K.’s dad has found him...again... and he couldn’t even play it off as an accident this time. He couldn’t just say “oops I sliced my arm.” A bottle of Oxy was starting to seem better by the minute. It would make him feel better that’s for sure. It would knock him out easily.

Though, despite the big gash on his arm, he didn’t feel much of anything beyond the sticky staining of his blood on his skin and clothes.

Owen dialed 911 with one hand while trying to stop the bleeding with the other. T.K. could see the layers of his father as if he was looking through a glass onion. Owen had a reassuring energy as he always did in an emergency but T.K. could also see the more nuanced hints of fear, sorrow, and dread weighing down Owen’s body. 

The worst part of being a human disaster was dragging down those you love who just can’t let go. T.K. felt like he was a block of iron being thrown into a pool, dragging all his loved ones in with him because they refused to unlock the chain they had to him. Owen could have detached himself from T.K., reduce the ache of losing him to a faint sting of losing someone you used to know but have almost forgotten, but the more T.K. struggled, the closer Owen attached himself.

“I’m sorry,” T.K. said when Owen had hung up the phone. “I’m sorry I made a mess.” His dad gripped him harder, running a hand through his hair. “We’re going to be just okay,” Owen promised, but T.K. wasn’t so sure. He didn’t think he’d ever feel normal again. He just wanted to sleep. And disappear.

There was nothing more humiliating than a failed suicide attempt. T.K. hated that he couldn’t even kill himself right. He was so sick of being alive— of getting out of bed and getting dressed and brushing his teeth. It was little things that made him feel worn out, and it seemed unlikely that they’d ever go away because people are expected to do thousands of little things a day without much thought. But those things took more work than they should’ve, and T.K. was sick of it.

The only relief T.K. had was that none of the first responders who arrived at the scene were anyone he’d known. They whisked him away to the hospital, stitching his wounds and watching for infection.The physical damage was the easy part.

He went to the emergency room and was treated for his physical ailments. After, he was kept three more days in the psych ward because he was apparently a risk to himself. T.K. didn’t fight the treatment. They’d force him if he didn’t agree. For those three days, he did what he was told so that he could get the hell out and maybe move on with his life. His dad urged him to stay longer, but T.K. wanted to be at home where he felt safe, comfortable, and not crazy.

He didn’t regret trying to take his life but he regretted all the misery that came afterward.

He scheduled extra days with his therapist and barely had any moments when he wasn’t supervised by his dad or whoever his dad sent over to keep him company. The whole team came over and Carlos was there more than T.K. thought their barely relationship required. The fact that Carlos hung around so much was painfully touching. It hurt people cared so much about a loser like him. Even Michelle and Grace would drop by to see how he was doing or make sure he wasn’t sitting in a pool of his own blood. 

The way they all looked at him with pity and sorrow made a hot lava boil in his stomach. He wanted to snap and yell at them. He wanted to tell them to leave, but mostly, he just tried to be silent because he already felt bad enough for being such a terrible person. He hated himself for doing this to them.

If he was dead, they could’ve had a funeral and moved on, but because he was alive, he’d burdened them with worrying about whether he’d make it through the day unscathed. They all knew what he had done, which made a fresh dose of rage surge through him because it was harder to keep destroying himself when everybody knew that’s what he wanted to do.

It’s pretty easy to hide what you’d done after a not-quite-accidental overdose, but hiding the giant cut on your arm wasn’t so easy, especially when it was summer and 102 degrees so long sleeve shirts were foolish at best. It was written all over his arm that he was a suicidal idiot, which only gave him the urge to even it out and desecrate his other arm, but he didn’t have the energy to fail at suicide again, so for now, he lived in the in-between where he wasn’t quite getting better but was desperately trying not to get worse. Maybe someday, when he didn’t have to work so hard just to be, he could take a little step forward, but for a while longer he needed to wallow in the thoughts of what might’ve been.

T.K. couldn’t imagine ever regretting trying to kill himself. He regretted failing. He regretted his time at the hospital. He regretted making his life even harder. He regretted not choosing opioids. He regretted not trying again. Mostly, he was sorry for making a mess.


	2. Owen

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Owen's POV for the aftermath of T.K.'s suicide attempt.

Owen could still feel the blood on his hands. Every time he washed them, he scrubbed them extra hard, still feeling the coppery wetness even though it was long gone. His hands were dry and cracked, but it beat the perpetual feeling of blood on his hands.

It had been a month since T.K. had tried to kill himself, but Owen couldn’t shake the image of his son bleeding out on the bathroom floor. He thinks he’ll die with that image still stamped in his head. He’s seen a lot of horrific things. He’d been there on 9/11 but seeing what T.K. had done to himself was the most terrifying moment of Owen’s life. Some things in life were written with permanent marker, and this was one of them. T.K. had tried to kill himself before, Owen suspected, but no other time had been so graphic, so blatant. Not even T.K.’s last overdose had hit him so deeply.

The worry won’t abate. There was always a dull fear in the back of his mind that T.K. might try something again, and sometimes it was in the forefront, sharp and panicked, but he tries to not let it consume him. Owen is completely lost about how to handle this. He doesn’t know how to be worried without be overbearing. He’s used to fixing disasters and he can’t fix this one.

Owen can’t help but watch his son, but T.K. is sensitive about Owen watching him too much. He gets angry and withdrawn if Owen lets his eyes linger too long. T.K. wants things to go back to normal, but Owen wants to know that his son is okay, which leaves them in stalemate, Owen worrying T.K. isn’t okay when he braves taking his eyes away and T.K. feeling like a zoo animal when Owen can’t help looking.

It is still hard for Owen to wrap his mind around the suicide attempt. It would be hard for any father to realize his son had wanted to kill himself. How did you make sense of that knowledge? How did you process the fact that the kid you used to toss in the air and catch wanted you to let him fall? And it makes it all the worse when you wonder if maybe he’d gotten used to you letting him fall as a kid, and that’s why now he dares you to do it, and maybe there’s a childish part of him that’s hoping you’ll catch him. Whatever you do, you can’t win. It’s too late to fix what has been broken. You can only try to piece it back together and hope you aren’t missing too many of the little shards that got lost along the way. You try to make things as seamless as you can, but there are always marks.

Owen thinks about the past a lot, T.K.’s childhood mostly. He wonders how different things may have been if he’d put more effort into being there. There are no guarantees that anything would have been different, but the thought that they could have been is agonizing. Owen can hardly sleep with how persistent the thoughts are. He dreads them, but there’s a part of him that thinks they are deserved.

Owen remembers the first time he held T.K. There had been some complications with the pregnancy, leaving him worried for while, but Tyler Kennedy and Gwen had both been okay in the end, a strong, resilient team. Relief had filled Owen as he held the tiny being in his arms, never having felt a love so deep. The affection he felt for his son had been immediate, and he swore to T.K. that he would keep him safe. He couldn’t help but feel that he had failed because he was at least in part culpable for what T.K. had done. He knew it wasn’t just him, but he hated every part that was.

Owen isn’t sure when things will finally start to feel better. He wonders if he’ll ever look at T.K. and not worry again. He’ll always worry. T.K. is his son, after all, but he hopes that someday he can laugh and hug his son without wondering if it would be the last time they’d laugh and hug. The whole situation is bleak, but Owen will do whatever he can to make it better. He’ll help T.K., and he’ll try not to smother T.K. He’ll catch T.K. when he falls whether T.K. wants him to or not because that’s what fathers do. They throw their children into the air, giving them the chance to reach the stars, and when they don’t quite catch the star they reach for, fathers catch their children, and then they throw them up and catch them again and again until the children can leap into the heavens themselves. But even then, parents are always there waiting for the fall. Just in case. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I had a suggestion about showing this story from other POV's, and I thought it was a cool idea, so I thought I'd add Owen's POV. Might add more POV's later (probably Carlos next if I choose to).

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading. As always, I will be at lonestarbabe.


End file.
